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Socio-cultural and financial issues against breast cancer screening behaviour among eligible Indian women: evidence for action

  • Epidemiology
  • Published:
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Abstract

Purpose

Breast cancer, a common malignancy in Indian women, is preventable and curable upon early diagnosis. Screening is the best control strategy against breast cancer, but its uptake is low in India despite dedicated strategies and programmes. We explored the impact of socio-cultural and financial issues on the uptake of breast cancer screening behaviour among Indian women.

Methods

Breast cancer screening-uptake and relevant social, cultural, and financial data obtained from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) round 5 were used for analysis. We studied 399,039 eligible females to assess their breast cancer screening behavior and determine the impact of socio-cultural and financial issues on such behavior using multivariable logistic regression.

Results

Most participants were 30–34-year-old (27.8%), educated to the secondary level (38.0%), and 81.5% had bank accounts. A third (35.0%) had health insurance, and anaemia was the most common comorbidity (56.1%). Less than 1.0% had undergone breast cancer screening. Higher age, education, urban residence, employment, less privileged social class, and access to the Internet and mass media were predictors of positive screening-uptake behavior (p < 0.05). Mothers of larger number of children, tobacco- and alcohol-users, the richer and having health insurance had negative uptake behavior (p < 0.05).

Conclusion

A clear impact of socio-cultural and financial factors on breast cancer screening behavior is evident among Indian women. Therefore, apart from the ongoing health system strengthening efforts, our findings call for targeted interventions against prevailing misconceptions and taboos along with economic and social empowerment of women for the holistic success of India’s cancer screening strategy.

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Funding

The authors declare that no funds, grants, or other support was received during the preparation of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Community Medicine, Midnapore Medical College, Midnapore, India

    Shibaji Gupta & Abhishek De

  2. Department of General Medicine, Ramakrishna Mission Seva Pratishthan, Kolkata, West Bengal, India

    Sharmistha Sinha Gupta

  3. Department of Surgery, IPGMER, Kolkata, India

    Rudradeep Banerjee

  4. Department of Community Medicine and School of Public Health, Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, India

    Sonu Goel

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  1. Shibaji Gupta
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Contributions

SGP: conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, methodology, project administration, writing—original draft. SSG: conceptualization, data curation, writing—original draft. AD: supervision, writing—review and editing. RB: project administration, visualization, writing—review and editing. SGL: methodology, supervision, writing—review and editing.

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Correspondence to Shibaji Gupta.

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Gupta, S., Sinha Gupta, S., De, A. et al. Socio-cultural and financial issues against breast cancer screening behaviour among eligible Indian women: evidence for action. Breast Cancer Res Treat 205, 169–179 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10549-024-07244-7

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